Switching off nuclear power plants in the middle of the energy crisis, declaring debts as assets and losing one state election after another: Germany’s liberals are doing all this and much more – for the sake of the coalition with the SPD and the Greens. The flight of the voters does not seem to bother party leader Christian Lindner so far.
Wants to make 2023 a liberal “design year”: FDP leader Christian Lindner on Friday in the Stuttgart Opera House.
It was a year of crisis when the liberals of south-west Germany came together for their first epiphany meeting. Of course, on January 6, 1866, it was not foreseeable that the war between Prussia and Austria would begin half a year later. This Friday, 157 years later, the class reunion of the all-German Free Democrats took place again in Stuttgart, and the domestic and foreign political situation is similarly tense.
The Ukraine is defending itself against the Russian attack, Germany wants to send in tanks, and the FDP is part of an unpopular federal government in which it is in danger of being crushed between statist Social Democrats and the Greens, who fight against culture. 2023 could be a fateful year for Christian Lindner’s party. In the upcoming elections in Bremen, Berlin, Hesse and Bavaria, re-entering the respective state parliament is by no means certain.
Unlike in the two previous years, the rally in the Stuttgart Opera House did not take place purely digitally, but in front of filled rows. The transition of the pandemic into the endemic makes it possible. This also benefited the party leader. Lindner is an experienced speaker who knows how to make punchlines. The event had previously been commissioned by Secretary General Bijan Djir-Sarai to be “balm for the souls of liberals”. After all, the FDP has “great times” ahead of it.
Host Hans-Ulrich Rülke, FDP parliamentary group leader in the Stuttgart state parliament, identified “clear topics, clear edges” as Baden-Württemberg’s recipe for success. Lindner’s one-hour presentation did not consistently fit into this requirement profile. For long stretches, the finance minister sounded like a spokesman for the traffic light coalition with the SPD and the Greens. The “cheerful penetrance” of liberal self-assertion promised for future government action peeked through the cracks of a thematic monologue, which of course left out the riots on New Year’s Eve in Berlin.
What liberal handwriting?
Lindner focused his attention on a phenomenon that some observers would call close to wishful thinking: the liberal handwriting in the laws and decisions of the federal government. Citizens’ income, for example, a matter close to the heart of social democracy, with which support for the long-term unemployed was reformed, gives the “performance principle” new validity. Finally, the “additional earnings limits have been improved”.
The FDP, the party chairman continued, is a “design party” and wants to make 2023 a “design year”. He is also proud of the “special fund” of 100 billion euros for the Bundeswehr that the FDP helped to set up, the ratification of the transatlantic free trade agreement Ceta and the law on inflation compensation, which relieves 48 million citizens. Instead of Germany, Lindner spoke almost exclusively of “this country”.
The chairman knows that of the three governing parties, according to surveys, the FDP has lost most of its popularity and satisfied its own supporters the least. The danger of a “deformation of our country’s liberality”, which Lindner had feared at the Epiphany meeting in 2021, in the middle of the first winter of the Corona pandemic, has not been banned, despite liberal government participation. At least that’s how many sympathizers of the FDP see it.
The “Whistleblower Protection Act” promoted by the free-democratic Minister of Justice Marco Buschmann, which also opens the floodgates to denunciation through nationwide reporting offices, certainly does not score with convinced liberals. The same applies to the “Democracy Promotion Act”, which the federal government wants to promote primarily left-wing organizations in the political run-up. The constant admonition that without the FDP the country would drift completely into economic and political unreason is getting less and less.
On the other hand, it is of course true that governing in a coalition is an art. It is important to make compromises, especially for the smallest of three partners. Lindner definitely put needle pricks, for example when he warned of an “ethical excess” in foreign policy and thus aimed at the Green Department head Annalena Baerbock. Or when he criticized the ban on thinking about shale gas, which the Green Economics Minister Robert Habeck would rather import than have it produced in his own country. The FDP chairman also insisted that funds had to be generated before they were distributed, which some social democrats do not like to hear.
One election defeat after another
A look back at last year’s Epiphany meeting shows how quickly the balm for the liberal soul can disappear. In the Stuttgart Opera House, which was empty at the time due to the pandemic, the newly appointed Federal Minister of Finance and Deputy Vice Chancellor spoke of his party as a “growth value”. Partly crushing defeats in all state elections in 2022 should follow, in Lindner’s home North Rhine-Westphalia two thirds of the voters turned away from the FDP.
The hope for a “new immigration policy” was also deceptive. In no way are the SPD and the Greens, as Lindner expected, “more strongly that those who have no place with us can be returned to their old homeland”. Since then, the Federal Republic has not regained the “control over access to Germany” promised by the FDP chairman. At this year’s Epiphany meeting, he probably only said briefly and vaguely that immigration to the “asylum welfare state” must be more difficult in the future than that to the labor market.
Lindner’s dictum from January 2022 that nuclear energy is not a sustainable form of energy and is “not an option for Germany anyway” has also aged badly. SPD and Greens may also see it that way; By April 15 at the latest, the generation of nuclear power in Germany should therefore come to an end. But in business and also in Lindner’s party, many are concerned about energy security.
Brute green attacks
The fact that Lindner suddenly discovered the charm of domestic nuclear energy after the outbreak of war in the Ukraine and even wanted to have German reactors that had already been shut down checked for testing seemed unbelievable.
The signs point to confrontation not only in energy policy. Transport Minister Volker Wissing acts as the new punching ball in the intra-coalition exchange of blows. The Palatinate has not yet had a track record of success. Nevertheless, the brutality with which the Greens have recently described the transport sector as “our problem child” (Habeck) and locate “a major problem with climate protection” there is surprising – according to the parliamentary group leader in the Bundestag, Katharina Dröge. The FDP, in turn, refers to the rapidly increasing CO2-Emissions from coal-fired power generation, which falls within Habeck’s area of responsibility.
At the very end of the event in Stuttgart, Lindner made people sit up and take notice: the SPD and the Greens, she prophesied, would soon have reason to be grateful to the FDP. Only if the economy flourishes again thanks to liberal “tackling” would the coalition have a chance of being re-elected in 2025. Apparently, the leader of what he calls the “freedom movement” has found so much pleasure in governing with the two left-wing partners that he wants to continue the alliance.